About the author(s): Kasper Souren was born in the Netherlands, studied mathematics (MSc), electronic music and artificial intelligence, found out about Wikipedia in 2003 and dropped out while doing a PhD research in Paris. He then went to Africa to work for Geekcorps in Mali to do GNU/Linux, free software and network stuff) and tried to develop African language resources on the side.

In 1949 Souleymane Kante invented the N'Ko alphabet, to be used to write down Mandé languages. Later, in the seventies the Latin script was chosen, with some additional phonetic characters. These days Bambara is mostly written in the Latin script. Though especially in Guinea, there is still a considerable number of people who are familiar with N'Ko and not with the Latin script.

Geekcorps is a US-based, non-profit organization that places international technical volunteers in developing nations to contribute to ICT projects while transferring the technical skills required to achieve long-term stability. Ultimately we strive to cross-pollinate developing nations with the skills needed to maximize the benefits of modern telecommunications.

often when a Wikipedia has reached a certain number of articles it will grow on its own

Several options have been tried.

give out 200 CFA (30 eurocents) per article

inform university students about this

raise to 500 CFA (80 eurocents)

Community centre in Sabalibugu, Bamako

500 CFA an article was sufficient to get people in a poor area interested

thanks to the efforts of Frederic Renet there are 10 computers in a community center in a poor area of Bamako

they don't have an internet connection and it is cumbersome to get the articles online

I've been quite a while in Bamako now. And I've tried to get people interested. First with 200 CFA per article (0.3 EUR), but that didn't really work. I've tried with university students, but nothing really happened. Recently a new Geek arrived however, who has equipped a little community school/center with a bunch of computers, in one of the poorer areas of Bamako. And they are really interested. The university students and the more "well off" people couldn't be bothered with the 500 CFA. Poorer people however, don't have the money to use a cybercafe. 500 CFA per hour is considered cheap here, for using the internet, but is also unaffordable for at least 90% of the population.

Telecentres, cybercafes in rural Africa have a hard time selling their services. Hence NGO's have started buying up many hours a month, to be given away to people in the villages. As Don Osborn from bisharat.net (a website for African languages on the internet) noted:

"Anyway, the buying of time for people to use the telecenters is nice, but not sustainable. And it is a giveaway that develops nothing but a dependency. That's why I like your colleague's idea of paying [with internet time] for Wikipedia contributions. It effectively does four things with the same amount of FCFA that the previous practice did only 2:

supports the telecenter;

increases access;

generates something of longer term use (in this case, Wikipedia pieces);

helps the participants develop abilities and sense of contribution/belonging to a larger effort.

In a word, solutions that accomplish more than one thing with about the same expenditure of resources are elegant."